Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway The Business of Media: 60 Minutes, Billionaire Owners, and the Podcast Economy — with Sara Fischer About this episode Scott Galloway is joined by Sara Fischer, media correspondent at Axios and CNN analyst, to answer your questions on the state of American media — from the future of 60 Minutes to billionaire ownership of the press to the economics of podcasting.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:34 Scott Galloway? In today's Office Hours, we discuss who will replace 60 Minutes, or what will replace 60 Minutes, why billionaires keep buying media companies, and whether podcasting has already passed its peak. We're joined today by Sarah Fisher, media correspondent at Axios. Sarah, welcome to Prop G's Office Hours.
1:51 Speaker 05 Hi, thanks for having me.
1:53 Scott Galloway? We're excited about this. Our producers, when we tried to find a talented, insightful person on media, two separate people on the team came back and suggested, and your name was floated, so we're happy you're here. You ready to go?
2:06 Speaker 05 I'm ready.
2:08 Scott Galloway? There we go. Our first question comes from John McCauley on Instagram, who says, "As the old 60 Minutes crashes and burns, what in new media will carry on the mission?" So the first thing I would ask as a prelude to that question, Sarah, is it's a bit of a loaded question that assumes 60 is going away. What are your thoughts on... What happens to 60 and if in fact, if it is in fact does decline, does that create an opening for something else? What do you think happens here?
2:35 Speaker 05 Well, I think that three major correspondents signaling that they're going to stay on, including Leslie Stahl and Bill Whitaker, means that this show won't ultimately die. If they had chosen not to renew contracts, Scott, I think that 60 Minutes would have been done as we knew it and would have been replaced by a far different product. Because they're staying, I think you should, you can and should expect the mission of 60 Minutes to carry on, but with a caveat, which is that, one, I do think there's some audience trust that has been lost, given Scott Pelley coming forward and saying he felt pressure to change his journalism in response to management. And then, two, I think there have been some chaotic and confusing moments for consumers that they're going
3:20 Speaker 05 to have to reckon with when they decide whether or not they want to continue watching. In particular, pulling that episode about Seacott down and only to air it a few weeks later unchanged. So 60 Minutes won't go away, but I think that the trust has been burned a little bit. In terms of what could replace it moving forward, you know, on the broadcast side, they're facing such heavy cost pressures in traditional television that I'm hard-pressed to believe that anything from traditional television replaced it. On the new media side, there are some bright spots where I'm very optimistic. Right now, we're seeing a lot of nice momentum at the local level, Scott. You'd be surprised about that. But
4:02 Speaker 05 we are seeing philanthropists shift a lot of their effort and energy and money into starting local news startups that are commercially nonprofit, meaning they're going to get continued backing to break news and do investigations without the pressure of necessarily minting money. And then the other area where I feel increasingly optimistic is the public definitely recognizes the need for investigative journalism. We're seeing more reader donations go into outlets that do good investigative reporting. One area where I've found that's expanding, that I've been happily surprised by it, has been ProPublica. A lot of new donations coming in. We're seeing record reader revenue at places like
4:46 Speaker 05 The Guardian that are committed to investigative journalism. So the efforts of regular, everyday people and philanthropists right now seem to be filling the void that traditional commercial models are not.
4:59 Scott Galloway? There is some truth to fact-checked journalism that tries to hit it straight down the middle is important to a democracy, and people realize that. With respect to 60, and I'm curious to get your thoughts here, their approach of trying to disrupt it from a position of strength doesn't make any sense. They're basically trying to perform open-heart surgery on the healthiest person in the franchise. For 50 consecutive seasons, 60 has been the number one rated news program and garnering about 9 million viewers. That's up 9% year-over-year in an industry that's in structural decline, and it grew 5% in
5:40 Scott Galloway? the key demo of 25 to 54. So it's growing and it's doing well. It did about 80 million in revenue, ad revenue. That's 10 million more than the late show that same year. So this isn't an entity that needs to be disrupted. This has become very politicized because I think an obvious way to connect the dots here is, quite frankly, that a group of billionaires who feel there's probably more profit incurring favor with the current administration want CBS and specifically 60 to, I'm trying to say this as generously and as politely as possible, to be less anti-Trump. I can't figure out any strategy other than the Ellison's are either themselves very politically motivated to change the tone and tenor of CBS and 60,
6:24 Scott Galloway? or they see more money incurring favor of the Trump administration, who seems to be, I've heard, was incandescently enraged by the interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then Barry Weiss was similarly enraged with Anderson Cooper's sign-off. I think what will be interesting, if you look at the actual data, you had a bunch of people call me from 60. I think three or four of the seven correspondents have resigned. Six of the eight senior managers have left. But none of the corpus, the sixty or seventy editors, producers, analysts have left so far. So I think it all comes down to, you know, these layoffs or firings were timed, not accidentally, around the end of the season. They're going on a three-month hiatus.
7:10 Scott Galloway? It'll kind of be up to the product. While we all pick our corners based on, you know, politically what makes us feel good and big, grandiose notions about journalism and Trump. At the end of the day, if the product is really good in the fall with new correspondents and some old ones, I think it'll be fine. If it doesn't, it'll die a quick death and everyone will say, I told you so. So I don't, you know, it all comes down to this. The first five or six episodes in the fall. Any thoughts on that?
7:34 Speaker 05 Well, one thing that new management would tell you is that a lot of the success of Sixty Minutes does ride on the NFL because it airs right after. And the reason that they claim that they needed to come in and modernize it, even though that they were ahead, as you mentioned, ratings were up nine percent under executive producer Tanya Simon, is because they say, you're not taking into consideration how much this show relies on the NFL. What's now happened is that even if things were to go back to status quo, there's still a trust that has been broken between CBS 60 and the audience and CBS 60 and the management and the day-to-day staff there. And that trust means that being broken
8:16 Speaker 05 means that anytime somebody does encounter an ethically challenging situation or situation where there's ambiguity in terms of what's the best path forward, the trust is what allows you to have a constructive conversation to figure out the best path forward for the audience and journalism. And with that being broken, nobody believes that any decision you make was done in good faith. That is the big challenge that they're going to face moving forward. And make no mistake, there will be a time when an episode is questioned. Does it need to be pulled from air? Do we need to make changes? And I think that's where the rubber will hit the road. And if people feel as though they can't trust the product's changes or decisions being made, I think it's going to be very hard to get
9:00 Speaker 05 back to some of those, you know, the traditional ratings that they've seen for a long time.
9:04 Scott Galloway? Also.
9:06 Scott Galloway? Curious to get your thoughts on this. I find the media is just self-obsessed. This is the number one story in the nation, and this is an $80 million business. This is like, you know, Nike's Fuel Band was a much bigger bit. This is just a small business. Now, granted, I get that it does play an important role in America's dialogue. And the notion that a 60 is a diminished 60, or even goes away, is a threat to our democracy. I get the notion that there's an overall chill that's suppressing free speech. I think that's a big threat, and this is another indication of that. However, having said that, I see so many small, aggressive, you know, truth-to-power startups, including Axios, including Semaphore, including Puck. I don't see journalism or truth-to-power in any way being quashed.
9:50 Scott Galloway? I would argue that every time they try and do this, it's a game of whack-a-mole, and it just inspires a series of new startups backed by people. You know, the Bulwark, my God, are they giving Trump a hard time, and they're making money doing it. I don't see the threat to journalism, and I find that, I would say, there are few people, few groups, and this will piss off the everyone's favorite intellectual support animal, journalists, but there are few groups that more so than journalists, or I would say writers, who see themselves as more precious than they actually are.
10:26 Speaker 05 I could not agree with that more. I did this analysis once on the show Succession, how it is consumed by so few people relative to the amount of coverage that it got by journalists, because journalists are obsessed with covering their own industry and obsessed with themselves. The reason that this story is important, from my point of view, is because broadcast as an asset is a public good as defined by our laws. And as such, it needs to be regulated as a public good. When there's political pressure on somebody, on their journalism asset to get a deal close, the broader implications of that are, are we regulating a public utility based off of political preference?
11:08 Speaker 05 That, Scott, is a pretty serious problem, because you always want public utilities to be governed by independent agencies who can do what's best for the public. To me, that's the broader existential crisis, and it's bigger than just what's happening in media and the FCC. I cover the FTC. The Supreme Court will determine and is likely to side with Trump in Trump's firing of Democratic commissioners under that agency. I cover the Copyright Office, which the music sector that I cover, you know, broadly relies heavily on. Trump, uh, his administration tried to oust the head of the Copyright Office. So what are the political implications of agencies governing the public goods no longer being independent?
11:53 Speaker 05 That is a massive, massive story, Scott. But the problem is we're often neglecting to link some of these small incremental happenings, like these $80 million show 60 Minutes, to that broader narrative. And that's where I think, uh, the discussion has gone awry.
12:11 Scott Galloway? No, it's great. Let's move on. Uh, question number two is from J.C. Broll. Can our media ecosystem not be controlled by billionaires? It seems impossible to opt out. So just some data here. In 1983, 50 companies owned 90% of American media. Today, that share is controlled by just six corporations: Comcast, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, Skydance, Sony and Amazon. And when Paramount's pending acquisition of Warner Brothers closes, it'll be just five. More than half of all US online news sites' visits go to news sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities. In 2021, 23 of the world's largest corporations were in the media sector with a combined turnover of 2.8 trillion USD,
12:53 Scott Galloway? nearly double the combined GDP of the world's 40 poorest countries at that, at that same year. And media ownership, let's be honest, it does have a big impact on society, politics and culture, not necessarily reflected in the revenues or the market cap. Nine of America's 10 richest men are media executives or owners. Of those nine, five sit on Trump's Council of Advisors of Science and Technology. According to the Free Press's Media Capitulation Index, out of the 35 largest media companies, only two, Bloomberg and Netflix, operate independent from political pressure. So what do you think?
13:24 Speaker 05 Could that, first of all, Bloomberg refused to be covered by his own media outlet when he was running for president. So no, Bloomberg is not amused from political pressure. And Netflix has, in many cases-
13:35 Scott Galloway? But do you, but do you, let me just press pause there. Do you think that was an attempt to, to show independence and not, and not use his own media asset to speak favorably to his presidential run? Or you think it was a defensive protective move?
13:47 Speaker 05 Doesn't matter either way. Any news organization that's truly independent should never be told whether they can or cannot cover a person. And Netflix has, in many cases, removed episodes from its platform based on political pressure from other governments. So neither of them are immune. In terms of the billionaire impact, what we're finding is that you cannot stop the momentum of regular, everyday people putting their dollar behind the news, the information that they think is non-biased and best. Take a look at what's happening in Hollywood. Sure, there's gonna be a ton of studio consolidation, but the best performing box office hits these past few weekends have been from YouTubers, and
14:29 Speaker 05 they've been supported by 824, a smaller, independent studio. One thing I want to just make a note of, we in the US, we used to be, when we were majority newspaper country, we were mostly owned by families. And that mattered, Scott, because before the world became so globalized, families had incentive to serve their communities with solid, quality local news especially, because that helps their local businesses. A lot of times, these families, they made, you know, money in a constituency and news supported it. Fast forward to where we're at today, the local family ownership has died out. Obviously, you saw the Redstones have cashed out. Now it's moving to the Ellison's, but all those
15:13 Speaker 05 newspapers, a lot of them have been gobbled up by private equity. We have a few families that still own some big conglomerates. So the New Houses, you know, they own a lot over at Advance Publications, which is a sister company to Conde. And the Hearst Empire, which is tons of local papers, some local stations, a little bit of Disney and A and E, they are, that trust that is family-owned will eventually expire. So I think the thing that's happened is when families exit- Billionaire individuals have been coming in, but I think I feel very, very confident that billionaires are not going to control all the media. I think the public recognizes the importance of a diversified point of view and they're putting their money where their mouth is.
15:58 Scott Galloway? Yeah, a lot there. So I would argue that Hearst is arguably the best managed company you don't hear a lot about. They've essentially transitioned out of traditional media and magazines into data-driven businesses, whether it's Fitch, the rating agency. They have a great business tracking, uh, flight time or engine, uh, upgrade cycles. Um, I mean, they have figured out, they have taken the cash flow from what were essentially dying media companies, including a 20% ownership of ESPN, and they've transitioned into data-rich businesses. And that company is stronger, stronger than it's ever been. It's been outstandingly well-run. And the traditional media companies, the reality is they're vanity. Most of them
16:40 Scott Galloway? are vanity assets. James Murdoch just bought New York Magazine. It's, I think it does 70 million. I think it makes a little bit of money. This is a company worth 10 to 50 million as a private company. He paid a lot more than that because owning the local newspaper or the, or a magazine, a hot magazine, or a football team, uh, makes you the sexiest person in that city. It's just a very cool rap. I own New York Magazine. I own the New York Times. I own the New York Jets. And so these assets will always trade well above their cash flows or any reasonable valuation. And therefore, the only people interested in owning these assets at these valuations are the children of rich people. So this is, you know, billionaires are kind of the only people willing to buy at these valuations.
17:25 Scott Galloway? I mean, look, whether it's Redstone, whether it's David Ellison, whether it's Bronfman, it's all the children of rich people. That's just a function of economics. Uh, but again, I don't see it as an existential threat to the ecosystem. Any closing thoughts here?
17:40 Speaker 05 I agree with you. I love your sober take. There's one other group that I'm eyeing that does have a lot of vested interest in our news brands, and that is eastern, um, business moguls or corporations that need the authority of Western brands because they couldn't build homegrown, uh, brands with journalistic excellence due to oppressive free speech culture. So if you think about it, Nikkei buys the FT. High billionaire buys fortune. Forbes is still owned by a Hong Kong-based private investment firm. This trend is something I've been following a lot of.
18:20 Speaker 05 And the reason it's notable is they often care about these Western business brands because they can take their logos and put it on coffee shops or upsell conferences or build up authority in their own businesses back home. And that is, that is a trend I'm following. Televisa Univision, another great example of that. You know, the FCC was hesitant for a long time about giving Mexico's most powerful company access to the majority ownership of a US broadcaster that uses our public spectrum. So the foreign investment in US news media,
19:02 Speaker 05 for reasons other than just financials, is also very interesting to me. They're another group outside of billionaires that I'm watching.
19:10 Scott Galloway? It's a really interesting one, and I'm generally torn here because I've never been as excised about foreign ownership. Now, when four of $14 billion of foreign money coming into US universities is coming from One Nation Qatar and into generally departments called Middle East Studies, I think that's reason to be alarmed. I think they want more than, you know, return. The return they're looking for in that investment might not be congruent with Americans' interests. Whereas I think if, so far, I think the Gulf nations mostly coming in and funding like a media business or a technology company. So far, I haven't seen their ability to let the tail wag the dog here.
19:56 Scott Galloway? And I'm, again, and I said this, and it was very unpopular a few years ago when Uber was getting a lot of shit for raising money out of the Gulf. My attitude was cash their check. That ultimately downstreamed that results in our ability to. Have many of the programs that are progressives are fond of. I'll give you the last word here.
20:13 Speaker 05 I agree with you. I just think that we need a better mechanism as a society to determine where the line is. You know, it's that's the challenge. That's why I brought up CFIUS because CFIUS is ultimately controlled by the president and the lax DOJ enforcements of the line as it currently stands. I agree with you that we're often too precious. I talked to one big tech CEO who says this is the ultimate vulnerability of laissez faire economics and capitalism and democracy. And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be getting rid of our systems because as you know, they tend to support our society in ways that have a greater impact than maybe some of the risks we take. But it is a vulnerability that we all just have to acknowledge.
21:00 Scott Galloway? All right. We'll be right back after a quick break.
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24:31 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Question number three comes from the David Shambless. Have podcasts become too saturated? If video killed the radio star, what kills podcasts? All right, so first some data and then I'll turn it to you. Podcast listenership is is strong. 115 million Americans are weekly podcast consumers, spending a combined 773 million hours per week, nearly a four and a half X increase just in the past decade. About 160 million Americans are one in two are monthly podcast consumers, up from 46 million in 2015. Audio is still a very important medium. If you think of this as being audio, 92% of podcast consumers say they've listened to a podcast in the last week, with only 8% say they exclusively watch.
25:16 Scott Galloway? On whether it's saturated? That's an easy one, yes. There's almost 5 million podcasts, oh, about 440,000 or almost a half a million actively published. Get this, the median active show gets fewer than 30 downloads per episode. That's right, the podcast right in the middle gets an average of 30 downloads per episode. Just for reference, podcasts you're listening to now, over 30 days will get about 150,000 downloads. Prop G, Prop G Markets gets about 200,000 downloads and Pivot gets about 400,000. So there's definitely a crowding effect. And podcasts, what's interesting here, Sarah earlier was talking about trust as we were talking about 60. In terms of trust, they beat out every other media format.
26:01 Scott Galloway? Podcast hosts are the most trusted influence category. 56% of weekly listeners say podcast hosts matter most versus 20% for social media influencers, 15% for TV movie celebrities, 10% for radio hosts. And I'll come back to that because it's, I have experienced that personally. Again, the takeaway from the data, conventional advertisers won't sponsor a show unless it hits at least 5,000 downloads per episode. I would say it's more like 50. And a threshold that really only the top 1%, if not the top 0.1%. And last piece of data here, there's approximately, this data says a half a million, I think it's, I read 600,000 podcasts put out something every week.
26:43 Scott Galloway? Generously 600 are self-sustaining economically. But realistically, only 0.1% are economically viable. So while as a whole, the industry is booming, this company or this industry started from a digital footprint. And anytime there's digitization, there's very much a winner take most environment here. I am very bullish on the sector. But unfortunately, I think you're going to see greater and greater like a Gini coefficient or inequality within the industry. Your thoughts, Sarah?
27:12 Speaker 05 I agree with you. The Pareto Principle holds true here that, you know, 80% bring in 20% of the revenues. And I've talked to experts and analysts that say both in music and podcasting, so in both forms of audio, the Pareto Principle is actually much worse in terms of the 80/20. It probably is more closely to like 95 to 5. One thing I'd say with podcasts, though, is I always look at the numbers in terms of how do the traditional industries migrate to digital? In the television industry, $70 billion went to linear television advertising. And so we're constantly mapping how fast, Scott, that moves over to CTV, which is like streaming ads.
27:54 Speaker 05 In the linear world, radio, which has both spoken word and music, that's, you know, about a $28 billion industry today. Podcasts for advertising is about $5 billion. And so you wonder, why hasn't it moved over fast enough that it's much more equal? Because at this point in television, CTV and traditional advertising are actually about equal. And there's a couple of answers to that. One, and this came from Chris Balf, who is the CEO of a company called Red Ventures. They do podcasts and talent management for conservative radio podcasters mostly. They were acquired by Fox. Chris said to me, "The $5 billion number is the wrong number to be viewing the podcast industry."
28:38 Speaker 05 Because advertising-supported podcasts, the Pareto Principle absolutely prevails. But a lot of people from podcasts, they make money from other ways, whether it's selling subscriptions or selling merch or Patreons or what have you, or live events, or podcasts are a marketing expense.
29:00 Speaker 05 For their broader communication goals and missions. So he said the number that's a better proxy is probably like the $100 billion creator industry, not just assigning podcasts to $5 billion ads, which I thought was so fascinating because if you look at it that way, it is much bigger than radio. And then two, you know, to your point of like, you know, very few podcasters make enough to actually sustain a living on this. It goes back to what I was just saying about podcasting has become a really great marketing tool. And especially Scott, in the AI era, in the era of LLMs, they are so, they're going to get so good at picking up insights from audio and from
29:41 Speaker 05 radio. We're not quite there yet, but they're getting there. And so if you are recording a podcast, maybe you're doing a blog post about it, that's a better way potentially to get your name and brand out there for your company, for yourself, than it is, you know, to just simply do paid advertising.
29:59 Scott Galloway? So the way I would describe it is the lines are blurring. And what are podcasts? Podcasts are becoming television shows. They can be produced for cents on the dollar such that they can, more money can go to the talent. So if you're Stephanie Ruhl, or you're Ari Melber, or you're Gutfeld, they're getting anywhere from 0.5 to if there were stars, 10% of the revenue. Podcasters capture, you know, 70 to 80% of the talent. So you're seeing a pretty serious migration of talent from traditional media to podcasts. So Megyn Kelly's show on Fox probably generated a lot more top line revenue. She's making a lot more money on a smaller revenue
30:44 Scott Galloway? base of podcasting because she gets to hold on to 70% of it. The general split among distribution and advertising in the talent, if the talent is iconic, is 70, 30. So that's why you're continuing, I think, to see these things grow. In addition, advertisers, going back to the trust issue, on property media, we get CPMs or what we're able to charge advertisers, $45 for every thousand people that listen, because when you're in people's ears and they're doing something more intimate, walking their dog or doing their dishes, they don't skip the ads. And again, they trust podcasters at triple the rate of broadcast cable hosts or influencers, shocked influencers have any trust at this point. And so advertisers love it. They're, so you're getting, you
31:28 Scott Galloway? don't need to build as big an audience to have a more profitable business. In addition, the audience is much more attractive. So the average age of CNBC, Fox and CNN is between 62 and 69. The average age of a podcast listener is 34, skews, it's kind of half and half, but it does skew a little bit male. So, and it skews wealthy. So a wealthy, young, uh, male or professional is exactly ground zero for advertisers. They absolutely love it. And then the other X factor here that kind of, in my opinion, took podcasts over the top is Trump. And that is, a lot of people credit Trump's election victory, or at least the scale of his victory, with him embracing podcasts.
32:12 Scott Galloway? And the stat I love is by him flying to Austin and going on Joe Rogan, he got more listens and views than Vice President Harris would have garnered if she'd gone on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC every night for two hours for two weeks. And so everyone is embracing podcasts. I can call pretty much anyone who claims they're not running for president, but they are, and they'll come on tomorrow on this podcast because they now realize this is a medium for swing voters. That's the good news. The bad news is that, you said the Pareto Principle, you know, 20% adds 80% of the value. I'm not exaggerating. I think there's probably data that it's 0.1% get 98% of the revenue and probably 140% of the profits, because anyone in the bottom 99.9
32:58 Scott Galloway? Is losing money. This is absolute, this is income inequality gone nuts. This is high school basketball going to the NBA. I'll give you the last word here.
33:06 Speaker 05 You're completely correct, and I've pulled that data before. I think it was less than 1% get the vast majority of the down, like 99% of the downloads. I'm not quite sure on the monetization side. One thing I follow very closely as it pertains to podcasting is just the broader shift in the knowledge economy into audio has been really important. There's this company called Edison, which is considered one of the most authoritative research firms for audio, and they put out this study that shows that the amount of ear time is moved into being majority spoken word over music. That is because more people are shifting their sort of information and knowledge diets into audio. I think we're
33:50 Speaker 05 moving to a world where spoken word, which podcasts are part of, is becoming much more integral to staying informed and supposed to us relying on these traditional mediums, which did not allow us to multitask as much. And that's going to be a huge boon to the industry that we can't even fully quite appreciate yet, but the numbers all show we're moving in that direction.
34:13 Scott Galloway? Yeah, it's the stat that really pops out, and I'm going to parrot it, that you articulated that just blew me away is that in terms of listenership, the spoken word now commands more share than music. That just blows my mind. So, watch out, Taylor Swift, we're coming for you. Sarah Fisher is a media correspondent at Axios and an analyst for CNN. Sarah, really enjoyed this. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected] . Again, that's [email protected] . Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Sky Galloway subreddit, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. Sarah, thanks again for joining us.
34:57 Speaker 05 Thanks, Scott.
35:00 Scott Galloway? This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janer. Kami Rieck is our social producer. Brad Williams is our editor. Andrew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.
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